Lame "Balloon Deaths" as seen on Battle Report 2

"The Overlord death animation is cool, it just is. But it also clutters the screen."

Not by a lot though, and it vanishes quickly.

 

There currently working on unique death animations for each unit when it gets killed by other units ect. so I wouldn't be worried.

 

Believe or not, war is messy. In fact, it takes skill to see through mayhem and make good decisions. You want the game streamlined to facilitate clicking on units. Things are not always that simple, and they shouldnt be. I disagree on the whole view that the game should be turned into an arcade game so that people feel more comfortable. I want awesome gameplay like you, but i also want good looks.

In that specific example, the overlord can become an animation the second it dies, so clicking it would still select whateve is under it.

 

I never even used the word arcade.
And if you think of just simple graphics when talking about an arcade, then you clearly never visited a proper arcade. I just wanted to say that the if animations block the view, then you should be able to turn them off in multiplayer. Even if the units were all just little red dots, gameplay comes first outside campaign. Period.

 

I agree gameplay comes first, but your view is too simplistic. By your rationale, lots of aspects of the game could be reduced to "improve" the game. In the end, you'd end up reducing the game to simple polygons.

A game is also a piece of art. Explosions are as much a part of gameplay as +1 attack upgrades on a zergling; they are there to reflect the actual result of an action, and that clutter is as much part of balance as any other aspect of a strategy game. Don't turn the game into chess.

 

blizz usually keeps some element of cartoony in their games, the deaths are pretty good, actually realistic, and satisfying to the killer.

the game looks excellent

 

Welcome in here CyberMirror ! And enjoy your stay !

1.

You just mentioned something that is important for me too : the details of death animation. Remember the very first gameplay video of the announcement of Starcraft 2 in the Blizzard Invitational in Seoul in 2007. Two years ago already ! There were a battle between the Protoss (where we have seen the Mothership's abilities) and the Terran. At the end when 3 ghosts nuke the battlefield the animations were well done. The Colossus was destroyed and its legs felt on the ground. The battlecruisers were destroyed and their parts felt on the ground.
So the animations were well done.

It is a kind of random. I see sometimes that a battlecruiser blows up in a big explosion and another one felt on the ground.
In battlereport 1 the Colossus just blew up and disappeared. But a marine got cut in two by a zealot. You see the randomness.
In battlereport 2 the Overlord died with a good animation and it is true that the All-Mighty Queen disappeared in .... a puddle of blood. All is random according to me.

But don't worry, because we saw a lot of different animations for some units, like for the Marine who got cut in two by the zealot, and felt on the ground by the snipe ability of the ghost. For each unit there must be a specific animation according to the case where the unit dies. But that's theoric, it is an amazing work for Blizzard. Of course the battlecruiser will finish in pieces everytime it is destroyed.
I think those different animations of death for each unit will be practically done for the ground units only.

2.

I agree with EonMaster and Darktemplar_L when they say that those animations will distract us from the gameplay and reduce the performance of the game, especially for weak computers.

So I suggest that by default the best animations of death must be activable in the solo campaign and NOT ACTIVABLE for the multiplayer games.
In the solo campaign the player will have to choose between the 3 options as Darktemplar_L said. It will just depend on the capacity of the computer to calculate those animations.
In multiplayer it will be impossible to get those animations. Imagine you play in a game with 8 players, how will your computer do to calculate all the animations ? It will ben hard.
And in UMS maps, where you can control thousands of units, if they die with different animations the CPU of your computer will burn

So, animations activable for solo games (campaign and custom maps) and no animation possible for multiplayer games. They will just blow up or fall in puddle of blood (I mean most of them, of course I don't see how the Immortal for instance can be animated once he dies)


Jon ? This is a good question in here !

 

I you want the beauty for playing or say, watching a replay, you should be able to see it. Taking away animations from multiplayer is not the solution. Any douche with too high settings will lag the game. Animations should work the same way. If you have the hardware to put then on in a 8man FFA, why stop them? If you dont have the hardware to play a melee game on highest res, animations don't even come into the picture. They should be optional, but there, and well done.

 

The animations are always there Sueco. That is hard-coded into the game data. If somebody plays a game in the lowest settings, he can still save it like normal. A replay is always the same size, no matter what your settings are. The settings only determine what your pc -or mac- actually renders.

 

I can think of a few. As someone mentioned earlier, there's DoW. Empire Total War also had some nice death animations for units.

Uh, no, I don't. Trust me, I enjoy the Starcraft and Warcraft games, but they didn't invent the RTS genre. They were balanced, well-made RTS games, but they didn't 'set the standard'. They're good, but they haven't made any massive innovations by themselves, so much as taken what others have already innovated in and made it more polished. I'm not criticizing them for that, but your view is a bit unrealistic.

Turn the graphical settings down? I don't doubt there'll be an option to turn death animations off or to make them less fancy.

So, what you're saying is that people who take multiplayer super seriously should be the only ones catered to? I like the games, but I don't care so much about winning that I want to turn off a second-long animation for a tiny advantage I may or may not be quick enough to exploit anyway. Make them activatable in both solo and multiplayer games. If you don't want a cluttered screen, you can turn them off. If you want the game to look better, you can turn them on. That pleases both parties, as opposed to only one.

If I shell out thousands of bucks for a fancy-pants computer (and I have recently), I don't want to be limited because another guy is too lazy to go to Settings and turn down his game specs.

 

First of: welcome to the forum.

Now, about the Blizzard game clones: pretty much any rts game with rpg influence is based on Warcraft. They were the first to introduce that, along with proper hero units.
As for Starcraft: it was one of the first true rts games ever made. It introduced proper armor ratings, ways to balance units properly and more. Also: it introduced battle.net. Which pretty much set the standard for any multiplayer lobby since then.

 

@SOGEKING: You do understand that computers get better over time right? In my opinion, that completely destroys anything good about what you've mentioned.

@Bertinator: You're right. StarCraft and WarCraft didn't set the standard. But, that's only because nothing even comes close to them. In order for something to be a standard, it has to be able to be emulated consistently. Blizzard has never been topped and, with the way things are going, they never will be.

Also, gameplay mechanics aren't the only way something can be innovated. The three balanced races of StarCraft was nothing short of innovative and ground-breaking. I was going to mention some other things but Aurora beat me to it.

Great post, Aurora!

 

You're welcome.
Also, I didn't want my post to be to biased, but you pretty much said what I was thinking before posting: Blizzard has never been topped. At least not in the rts genre. Sure, Supreme Commander style games may have more units, but never even come close to Blizzard balance. However, Total War style games are brilliant. I love building my empire and such things, but Starcraft is no empire game with rts influences.

One last thing: WoW is popular, but the super hardcore mmorpg players have better alternatives. And Blizzard really needs to make a game like The Lost Vikings again. That game was epic, and most modern platform puzzle games cannot even come close to that game. -and its sequal-

 

We all agree that blizzard games have never been topped, thats not the topic. Even if they had been topped, thats a matter of taste, too.

The point is simple. SC1 death animations were made obsolete the second DoW came out with its gorgeous sync kills and epic melee animation. Nevemind that it was a horribly unbalanced game with no proper MP support, it has ONE thing that blizzard should learn from it, and we expect it to do so.

 

*sigh* for the last time: gameplay > graphics

But yeah, some DoW infuence would probably be a good thing for graphics.

And there are plenty of mmorpg games that are better, WoW is just the most casual of them all. Casual games get all the attention, even while games like Everquest easily wipe the floor with WoW. -as in having more members-

 

If I say that the good death animations must not be activable in multiplayer it is because there will always be a laggar with an old computer who will play SC2 and lag every players. So the death animations will complicate the calculations.
It is not because I prefer the solo campaign that I choose to get those animations included only in the solo.
It is a question of standards. Most of the players will not reach those standards. A weak configuration will be enough to play multiplayer without those animations. But who will get the latest computer on Earth and have a 100000000000 Mbits LAN connexion ? (I just exagerated)

Personally, now I am ok.

 

Erm, isn't lag caused by a combo of other internet traffic on your computer, -as in downloading while gaming- and a high ping value? :s

 

If a player is getting terrible frame rates it will cause lag. However, if lag bothers you that much imagine how almost unplayable frame rates would be for that person. I honestly don't think anyone's going to put the settings so high that it ruins their's or other's experience. If it's bothering you (as in lagging your game), then it's wrecking absolute havoc on that person's side. So, unless they're complete masochists they're going to turn down their settings. So, this argument should stop being used. Seriously. Worst case scenario: You ban or don't play with that person again. There can't be that many idiots on Battle.net that you'll run into more than one every once in a blue moon.

But, what's most important, is that, with everything going on on-screen and the various types of technologies used, animations are the last thing to be worried about. Removing or gimping animations wouldn't help frame rates that much if at all. That's why it's usually not even an option to be turned down in RTS. The only problem with animations is how it could possibly interfere with GAMEPLAY; not FRAMERATE.

@Sueco: Animations like that work in a non-competitive multiplayer game with larger environments like Dawn Of War. It could actually cause quite a few problems in a highly competitive game like StarCraft. So, the two should not be compared. It's like comparing Wii Sports to a REAL sports game.

 

Erm, ever looked into the settings of Warcraft 3? More then enough detail levels for people to choose from. Other rts games might have less of these options, but I doubt that Starcraft 2 lacks these, while Warcraft 3 did have them.

 

Sync-kills ala Dawn of War are indeed a pain in the ass to competitive gamers. It was one of the reasons that game never went pro (the main reason was poor multiplayer support from Relic)

Elaborated death animations just add flavour to the game. If your brain asplodes because you don't have neat and clean symbolic explosions you should'nt be playing an RTS game.